Social Media

Turn Your Online Travel Reading Into a Guidebook With This App

Travel writing is often more useful to travelers of the armchair variety than those actually planning a trip. A new app called Dcovery, however, wants to make travel blogs, articles and other writing a more practical resource for actual travel.

The app, which began accepting invites for its private beta this week, helps users automatically collect travel outing ideas from websites, adds relevant information such as addresses and syncs them in their phones for later use.

Here's how it works: Users install a bookmarklet on their browsers. When they're reading a travel article, they can launch the bookmarklet in order to automatically generate a list of venues featured in the article and add any missed venues by highlighting their names. Dcovery adds important details such as addresses and phone numbers.

All of this information, along with an excerpt from the original article, can then be accessed offline through the iPhone app (there's no browser-based access). If users turn their phone horizontally, the venue name and address appears in the local language — a feature anyone traveling by taxi will appreciate.

"We feel there is a lot of good travel information out there, but ultimately people are picking up a guide book because it's too hard to organize and plan from the blog posts," Dcovery co-founder Matt Bellemare tells Mashable. "The research, the Googling, the finding the place on the map... that's the pain."

Dcovery uses databases from Google Places, Foursquare, Wikipedia, Wikitravel and Open Street Maps in order to pinpoint mentions of venues in travel writing and match those venues with their location information.

When the startup launches its first public version, Bellemare says it will include sharing features for sharing and discovering lists of travel destinations. But the Thailand-based team of Canadians have a long way to go before that point. The development of the app is just getting started — they don't plan to send invites to the private beta until three or four weeks from now.

Dcovery has good company in its desire to create sharable lists of travel destinations. Wanderfly, Triipbirds, gtrot and Trippy all have their own takes on the idea. Pinterest, though not focused on travel specifically, is also commonly used to curate travel recommendations.

Bellemare thinks Dcovery can compete with on-the-ground practicality.

"[On most travel list social services] the question 'how do I get there' is left unanswered," he says. "That's what we're trying to address."

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